The Studio Magic Behind “Magic! – The Podcast”
Recently, many people have told me that Magic! – The Podcast sounds good – really good in fact. Some may wonder what I do to make the podcast sound radio quality. The answer lies within some studio magic.
My studio setup is simple, yet versatile. I record my voice with a Fender P-51 dynamic microphone. I do use studio mic technique. This microphone goes into my Fender Passport PD-250 mixer/amplifier, which boosts the mic signal. I have the eq set flat. The PD-250 is hooked up to my computer, which records my voice with Adobe Audition 1.5.
Once on Audition, I compress my voice using a plugin set for a low compression level designed for the voice. After compressing my voice, I run it through an equalizer. The equalizer setting I use puts the bass and treble of my voice at an even level, but removes some middle frequencies. This eq setting contributes to my voice’s “radio sound” by enhancing my deep voice. Once equalized, I boost and limit my voice to sit nice and high (but still fluctuate to sound natural) at around the -3 db or the “yellow” level. Once up there, it’s time to mix my voice with the music.
To get ready for this, I set the right amount of pause between segments and silence those pauses to remove room noise, computer fans, etc in the recording. I still leave just a few milliseconds of room sound before and after my speaking parts so the recording sounds natural. After that, I patch in my i-pod to my mixer and choose the music I want to play between segments and record the music. I manually fade the music in and out on the mixer. I record the transitional music at a low bass, high treble eq setting as to make the overall music louder. By removing most of the bass also, it makes the podcast easier to play without getting too much woofy bass on your i-pod or computer. Essentially, I am multiband compressing or lowering the level of a certain frequency for easier broadcast. After adding my transitional music, it’s time to export!
I convert the mixdown to mono (again, for easier broadcast) and save the file as a medium quality mp3 file (about 1mb a minute). That is how I produce my podcast and why it sounds so good. Like a lot of my audio projects, it takes trial and error and sometimes experimenting. For all the audiophiles out there, have fun!
Sammy
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